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Knight of Cups and Badlands director Terrence Malick is soon set to debut his second VR film.

The piece, named Evolver, will premiere as one of 10 projects at VR Days Europe in Amsterdam today, Screen Daily reports. Produced with the help of House of Secrets, the experience studies the lives of humans all the way from birth to death. Judging by the director’s most recent work, which includes breezy existential pieces like Song to Song, it’s sure to be a trip.

Perhaps most excitingly for film fans, though, the piece features music from Jonny Greenwood, the lead guitarist of Radiohead and composer of soundtracks for films like There Will Be Blood and You Were Never Really Here who was recently nominated for an Oscar for his work on Phantom Thread. Brilliantly, there’s also music from Wu-Tang Clan.

Malick’s first VR piece, Together, made the rounds at festivals like SXSW and Tribeca earlier this year. He’s easily one of the best-known and most influential directors working in VR right now alongside the likes of The Revenant’s Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Other projects being revealed at VR Days include Inside Out VR from Charlotte Bruneau and Cosmos Within Us from Tupac Martir. Films are being hosted in collaboration with the Rotterdam Film Festival. The event also includes talks from members of Unity, Beat Games and more.

The next game from the developers of one of our favorite VR wave shooters, Blasters of the Universe, is out very soon.

Transpose, a surreal VR puzzle game from Secret Location. Is launching on the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR headsets on Tuesday, November 6th. The game is already listed on both Steam and the Oculus Store, though you’ll probably have to wait a few more weeks to see it on the PlayStation Store.

Taking quite a different approach to VR than Blasters, Transpose has players solving puzzles by leaving echoes of their past actions that they can interact with. Real-time motion capture allows you to see an avatar of your former self replicating your past actions, which is a little trippy. It also throws a little zero-gravity wall-walking in there just for good measure. The game’s going to have over 35 levels that player out over three worlds, which the developer says will offer around eight hours of gameplay. It’s set to cost $19.99.

It’s been a busy few weeks for Secret Location, which also launched a VR adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Great C earlier this month. It’s great to see the developer branching out into new areas, but does it have another Blasters-sized hit on its hands?

Back in April, HTC launched the Vive Pro, a higher-end HTC Vive PC VR headset which added a 2nd outward-facing camera alongside a boost in display resolution. This camera setup has, until now, not seen any widespread use beyond AR experiments and niche enterprise applications, but now HTC have announced that they will be leveraging it to add native finger tracking to the Vive Pro.

Finger tracking for Vive Pro will be available to all registered VivePort developers via the Viveport SDK. This will not be a part of SteamVR and Valve seems to not be involved at all. We’ve reached out to HTC to clarify whether only Viveport apps will benefit from the input method.

Finger tracking could be useful for social VR, for passive experiences where a controller isn’t needed, and for enterprise applications. Some businesses already use the ‘Leap Motion’ finger tracking add-on, which works on all PC VR headsets, but HTC’s solution should work out of the box. The feature should also work fully in wireless mode with the HTC Vive Wireless Adapter.

HTC has also been researching hand tracking for its standalone (all-in-one) Vive Focus headset, which is currently released in China but not yet in the West. However, it seems that due to the much lower processing power on the mobile platform (compared to the PC a Vive Pro would be attached to) this is only limited gesture recognition rather than true tracking of each finger.

The standalone Vive Focus will get hand gesture recognition, but not full finger tracking

HTC hasn’t showed off the Vive Pro’s finger tracking to journalists yet, so questions remain about its accuracy, latency, occlusion resistance, and whether or not the field of view of the cameras leads to “pop in”. We hope it works well enough, though, because this feature could be a game changer for the enterprise market and passive VR experiences in general.

In recent months we’ve been talking about some new definitions and marketing terms that are coming into more popular use — “wireless” and “standalone” VR. While we’ve seen hints of it in 2018, next year is when the technology will really take off.

Before I get into why that’s going to be the case, here’s an overview of where everything is for VR near the end of 2018:

We’ve tested the “Vive Wireless Adapter” and Vive Pro powered by Intel’s WiGig technology, as well as the forthcoming Oculus Quest headset and its truly wireless “Insight” tracking system. They both seem to work well.
Google’s head of VR and AR Clay Bavor made clear to us in a 2017 interview that Google could pursue its own devices in VR and AR. Google’s hiring of teams working on software like Tilt Brush, Soundstage and Job Simulator join home-grown projects like Blocks that generally indicate awareness of a consumer desire for intuitive hand-based input in VR. Most recently, Google signaled its intent to power a wireless standalone VR system with the kind of hand input we’ve come to expect from Vive, Rift, PSVR and even Windows-based headsets.
We know PlayStation VR sold 3 million headsets over two years and that Gear VR eclipsed that figure, but fewer people use those phone-powered headsets which are often bundled with a phone.
Former VR development companies like CCP Games have executives who now say they’d hoped the PC market they were selling into would be 2-3 times as large as it is. Some independent developers, however, can clear milestones like selling 100,000 copies of their game in a single month of 2018 available only on PC VR systems.
Valve continues to push input forward with the Knuckles controllers — while also building its own VR games — but partner HTC is charging a premium to get wireless VR or large-scale tracking with a PC in 2018.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t say much about Rift at the Oculus Connect 5 developer conference, except to say that a “new version” of the Rift would likely be “for experiences that need a PC to push the edge of what’s possible.”
We’re excited to see how the new Samsung Odyssey+ performs with SteamVR games, but it fundamentally still operates with a tethered connection to a PC.

The state of VR after the first two years of broad consumer availability is a complicated story not many understand, but the underlying pressure at play right now is that some money-strapped developers working at technology’s cutting edge in the last few months of 2018 need to decide whether to suffer the arduous process of porting their work to standalone VR headsets like Quest or the Mirage Solo, or to push development forward with their PC-based VR games. The first option means betting Facebook or Google will get a sufficient install base willing to pay $20+ for content, while the second option means developing games in hope that future PC-powered hardware will open the market up to more people.

With Halloween right around the corner next week, we felt like it was time to start rounding up some of the very best VR horror games and experiences out there. While many of the absolute best VR games are relegated to more powerful devices, such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or PSVR, mobile-based headsets like the Oculus Go, Gear VR, and Google Daydream.

For this list we’re focusing primarily on apps and experiences that can be accessed from an Oculus Go standalone VR headset. You can read our full review of the device here (we like it a lot) as well as our big list of 30 great games and apps worth checking out here.

The following experiences are all listed in alphabetical order:

Affected: The Manor

Price: $2.99 (Store) (Our Review)

If you want to be terrified or, better yet, you want to terrify a friend while you watch safely from the couch, Affected: The Manor is an excellent choice. It’s use of sound and clever scripting are superb for any VR horror title, mobile or not, and its visuals are another example of just how good a Go game can look. It’s light on gameplay and very short, but excellent as a one-off horror experience.

Cursed Night: The House

Price: $4.99 (Store)

If you’re after some cheap and easy jump scares, then this is always a good option. It’s one of the quickest to get into so if you’re showing the Oculus Go to family this Halloween, this is a solid choice. The tension and build up is very well done, but it’s not the most visually impressive.

Dark Corner

Price: Free (Optional Paid Content) (Store)

Miss the days of sitting around a campfire, telling scary stories with friends? Then Dark Corner may just be what you’re after. It’s sort of like a repository for spooky 360 videos and other experiences that can all be accessed from a single, central hub-like interface.

Dark Days

Price: $7.99 (Store) (Our Review)

Dark Days does a lot of things right and provides an interesting world full of thrills and mystery to keep you uncovering secrets until the end. Visually, it leaves a bit to be desired, but it accomplishes a lot for being on the limited Go platform. While the main character can feel a little annoying at times, you’ll grow to love her wit and charm as the adventure carries on. Prepare for a generous helping of jumps and scares though, as this isn’t for the faint of heart.

Dead Secret and Dead Secret Circle

Price: $9.99/$14.99/$16.99 (Store for Two-Game Bundle)

Described as “slow-burn psychological horror” the Dead Secret games feel like they could have been ripped right out of the mind of David Lynch or pre-Dark Knight Christopher Nolan. Part murder mystery and part sadistic fight for survival, these are two VR thrillers that you can easily sink several hours into each to uncover all of the secrets.

Doors of Silence: The Prologue

Price: $4.99 (Store)

Visually, this might very well be the best looking VR horror game on Oculus Go, period. Environments are incredibly detailed and hand-crafted using Unreal Engine 4.

Earlier this year we published a story about the 3DNesVR emulator that lets you run NES games inside VR by converting them to 3D versions of themselves. It’s pretty impressive from a technology perspective and experiencing these games again in VR really changes things.

Since then, the app has undergone more work and now has a free demo available on Steam for anyone to try. The demo is still limited at this time, but does reportedly support:

Since this is an emulator, obviously it doesn’t include the ROMs for the games — you’re expected to (legally) provide those on your own. In addition to simply running the games inside VR and converting it to a 3D perspective, the 3DNesVR emulator also provides a VR-focused UI, different render styles, save-states, and motion controller support.

When the full app releases (currently planned for January 2019) it will support “massive games both classic and modern homebrew” natively, but nine titles for a demo is already a great start. Here’s some footage of the creators at Geod Studio playing Metroid with it, for example:

You can find more info and presets over the 3DN Repository here. It’s an ambitious and cool project and seems like the next best thing to Nintendo’s lack of interest in VR. You can try out some other fan-made Mario-focused VR projects as well here and here.

As a little-known initiative, Oculus is actively funneling in talent with the promise of training, tools and other resources that developers — new and old — can use to build projects for the Oculus platform as well as for the greater VR ecosystem. Each June, over 100 participants are chosen to attend the official Oculus

When it comes to VR horror games, many games sadly fall short in their quest to be truly scary, and instead just aim to give players a few good jump scares before unraveling pretty fast. Many games opt to go all-in on scares, and don’t deliver on what makes something truly scary: an overwhelming sense of dread. In Home Sweet Home’s case, however, you’re not just given some good scares, but are also constantly filled with that feeling of terror throughout the game, which already makes this Thai horror title worth the time.

Developed by Yggdrazil Group, a Thai visual effects company, Home Sweet Home was released last year as a non-VR PC title before getting the virtual reality treatment, which honestly seems to have made the game even more exhilarating. While you can play the game without a VR headset still on PS4, its style of play and surprisingly great looking atmosphere make it that much scarier once you strap yourself into a PSVR. Home Sweet Home tell the tale of Tim, a man who wakes up in a strange place after what seems to have been a night out drinking. As you begin to explore the strange building you find yourself in, it doesn’t take too long for some creepy stuff to start happening.

Though the plot — which shouldn’t take more than six or so hours — might be lost on some people who don’t choose to explore, Home Sweet Home actually offers a surprisingly deep amount of backstory. From the start, it appears that you’re searching for your missing wife, Jane, but in typical horror game fashion, things begin to unravel in frightening ways until you find yourself in the middle of a story that draws from various Thai myths and legends, all designed to freak you out as much as possible.

As far as gameplay goes, don’t expect anything too different from Home Sweet Home, who borrows heavily from past horror titles like the canceled P.T. demo and Outlast series. You’ll find yourself exploring a surprisingly good looking set of rooms, with some sort of light (be it a flashlight or candle) and some other tool to defend yourself. Much like other horror titles, you’ll also be able to find and collect various odds and ends, such as newspaper clippings or diary entries, that expand the story and give some more context as to what exactly is going on in.

When it comes to the world of VR, the number one key to any title is the immersion factor, and Home Sweet Home actually manages to accomplish that thanks to its incredible sound design. Not only is sound so important for a virtual reality game, it’s probably the most important factor in any horror experience. You need things like ambient noises, growls, or simple things like footsteps and silence to feel a certain way in order to draw you in for when the big scares occur. Thankfully, Home Sweet Home has no problem with this, as the sound in

ESPN’s sports talk/game show, Around the Horn will be celebrating its 16th year with a major facelift that will debut on November 5th. The new format will include fresh graphics, new animations, a redesigned logo, and updated music. More importantly, Around the Horn is the first domestic U.S. show to feature AR functionality throughout the entirety of a 30-minute broadcast.